Pair of Hornet alumni head California Department of Technology

If you think dealing with technology issues at home or at the office is a big job, imagine doing it for the entire state of California.

Amy Tong

Running the state’s Department of Technology – keeping computers and other technology up and running for more than 130 government agencies, as well as providing strategic guidance for California’s IT programs and policy – are two Sacramento State alumni: Amy Tong ’94 (Management Information Systems), MBA ’98, and Chris Cruz ’88 (Business Administration). Tong is the department director as well as the statewide chief information officer; Cruz serves as chief deputy director and deputy state CIO.

Both grew up in Sacramento – Tong immigrated to the United States from China with her family when she was 12 – and came to Sac State in large part because it offered an affordable, quality education close to home. Both also have spent nearly their entire careers working in the public sector and say they enjoy their current roles because of the ability to take a wide view of the state’s technology infrastructure and propose solutions to make it more efficient and effective.

Below, they answer a few questions about their time at Sac State and their current jobs with the Department of Technology.

Why did you decide to attend Sacramento State?

Cruz: It was an easy decision for me because, for one, my parents were helping me pay for college, and I found out that I could actually live at home. I also liked the fact that Sac State has a strong business administration program, and that’s where my degree is, in business administration and management. So I really enjoyed my time there, and the fact that it was easy for me to live at home and go to school.

Tong: I’m actually very, very similar. I was able to live at home, and I worked throughout college to help (pay for) my tuition as well as help my family. Staying close to my family was important, and Sac State has a great reputation. One other thing that attracted me was the difference between the Cal State and the (University of California) systems. My brother actually went to UC Davis, so we have this debate all day long at home that the UCs are more research-oriented and Cal State is more practical. I’m a practical person, so I liked the Cal State system.

When did you become interested in working in the IT field?

Tong: My major (management information systems) was in either its first or second year when I started at Sac State. It’s computer science but inside business administration, and that’s kind of the uniqueness that attracted me. How do you apply computer science into business?

Chris Cruz

Cruz: I always had an understanding that I would get into the IT field, but I actually started in business and went through understanding policy and business before I transitioned into information technology, which I did at the midpoint of my state career. That served me well in terms of having the business sense to communicate technology to business folks, because it can be quite frustrating if you’re very technical in your approach and you’re not able to break things down into what I call “bricks and mortar” for them.

How has what you learned at Sac State helped you throughout your career?

Cruz: I graduated in 1989, and six months after, I applied for state jobs and was able to get a state position at the Department of Justice. Sac State gave me the foundation to get into an analytical position as opposed to starting in an entry-level position. It prepared me for what I would learn in business, the economics of things, looking at the fiscal perspective of how government works and operates, and being able to have that big-picture thinking.

Tong: After my bachelor’s degree, I came directly to work for the state, but I had the opportunity to work during the daytime and go to night school for my master’s. It really helped me appreciate more of what I learned in college and then immediately apply it to what I needed to do at work. That back-and-forth makes the whole learning experience much more meaningful. That’s one thing I really enjoyed about Sac State. Even through my bachelor’s degree, (for) a lot of the items that were taught in the classroom, my professors always talked about how they would apply to real-world experience.

What’s your favorite part about your job?

Tong: Problem solving. My favorite part is that we have a broad perspective and can realize that Department A has a solution that can be used for Department B. We’re in the unique position to facilitate a lot of this collaboration and look for ways to share resources and streamline efforts for the state as a whole. Having a more enterprise-wide view, a statewide view, a holistic view helps drive efficiency within government.

Cruz: Having the opportunity to come in and work with Amy and all the fine people here to help transform the way government works from a technology perspective. That has been something that I enjoy waking up in the morning and knowing, that we are making a difference as a technology organization, and that we’re making things more efficient and effective for government through strategic change, through a collaborative government. It’s not an army of one. It’s an army of many.

What’s your advice to current Sac State students?

Tong: Get a job while you’re going to school. That work experience is invaluable. I know when we’re hiring, we always look for a good balance of education and practical on-the-job training.

Cruz: Learn that life is a privilege and not an entitlement. When you come into a job, a degree doesn’t guarantee a certain amount of success. What it does is get your foot into the door, but what you do after that, you’ve got to earn and work hard.

Alum Tracy Young profiled in The Huffington Post

Sacramento State alumna Tracy Young ’08 (Construction Management) featured was recently in The Huffington Post as part of a series of articles featuring first- and second-generation immigrants who are entrepreneurs. Young is the CEO and co-founder of PlanGrid, a software company that hosts cloud-based digital construction blueprints, and recently spoke on campus as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week.

The article details Young’s rise from construction management student at Sac State to CEO of a global company with more than 330 employees and tens of thousands of customers, as well as her family’s journey to the United States as refugees. Young’s parents fled Vietnam in 1977 with their one-year-old daughter, Young’s older sister.

You can read the full article at The Huffington Post. Our recent Made at Sac State profile of Young can be read at sacstatemadeblog.com.

Tracy Young brings the construction industry into the mobile era

Tracy Young ’08 (Construction Management) knew her industry had a paper problem.

It was 2010, four years into her construction engineering career, and she was growing frustrated with 3,000-page blueprints that would turn over multiple times during projects and often contained outdated information.

Luckily for her, 2010 also was the year Apple released the first iPad. Even better, her best friend from Sacramento State, Ryan Sutton-Gee, had stood in line to be among the first to get the new device, and she was meeting him for a drink later that night.

“He showed me his iPad, and I was telling him about this blueprint problem I was having and how it was impossible to get the latest changes, and he slammed the table — a little bit drunk — and said, ‘That’s ridiculous. It’s 2010. The cloud exists. All of this should be on this iPad,’” Young says. “And that was the start of PlanGrid.”

Tracy Young, right, with fellow Sacramento State alumnus and PlanGrid co-founder Ryan Sutton-Gee at their graduation in 2008.

PlanGrid is the company Young, Sutton-Gee, and several other partners founded in 2011 to bring the construction industry into the mobile device era. Young currently serves as its chief executive officer. The company’s software platform hosts digital blueprints that can be accessed on tablets or smartphones and are updated in real time so that construction companies and contractors have access to the latest versions, reducing both paper waste and errors.

“It was just so obvious that the iPad would be perfect for the construction industry,” Young says. “We were just lucky enough to be the first ones that wrote software for it.”

Autodesk, a Marin County-based company that makes software for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, and entertainment industries, purchased PlanGrid in November 2018 for $875 million.

The daughter of Vietnamese refugees, Young grew up in Milpitas, just north of San Jose. She had an interest in buildings and loved architecture, but knew her artistic skills were limited. She was, however, good at math and at solving problems, which led her to declare as a civil engineering major when she followed her older sister to Sacramento State in 2004. Once on campus, however, she discovered another potential career path: Sacramento State’s nationally renowned construction management program.

“I had to make a choice about whether I wanted to sit behind a desk and make the math work (on a project) or be part of the actual construction process and be on a job site, and I chose the latter,” she says.

The construction management cohort was small, allowing the group to become incredibly close-knit and lean on each other to make it through a difficult course of study. It’s an experience Young still draws on as a professional.

“What I learned most from my classmates was the power of working together,” she says. “We just so badly wanted all of us to get through the courses that we did things to help each other make it through.”

Young recalled spending hours in the teachers’ lounge, studying with her classmates, but her favorite courses were held outside, such as when they surveyed along the American River levee near the Guy West Bridge. She also interned with general engineering contractor Syblon Reid and worked as an assistant estimator for Turner Construction while a student, providing her with additional hands-on experience.

Following her graduation in 2008, she returned to the Bay Area and began working as a project engineer for Redwood City-based construction firm Rudolph and Sletten, a position she held until she left in 2011 to found PlanGrid.

Shifting from engineering to technology was a bit jarring – “I definitely miss the smell of drywall dust,” she says – but Young sees a lot of parallels between building a building and building a company.

“The medium is different,” she says. “Instead of wood and concrete and glass, there are people and there are departments. You’ve got designers and then you also have the builders, the hackers. There are quality-control problems, bugs you have to fix. Schedule is incredibly important.”

Since 2011, PlanGrid has grown from four co-founders to more than 330 employees today. The company has tens of thousands of customers in more than 72 countries, and has stored more than 50 million sheets for more than a half million projects worldwide.

With an innovative idea at its core and a large global footprint, it is only natural that Young will be speaking about PlanGrid at Sacramento State this week, along with her husband and fellow PlanGrid co-founder Ralph Gootee, as part of the campus’s second annual Global Entrepreneurship Week.

As CEO of PlanGrid, Young spends about a third of her time travelling and meeting with customers and her field teams, about a third of her time meeting with her executives who are running the day-to-day operations of the company, and the last third on high-priority projects. Becoming a manager, she says, has been challenging, but also offers her the opportunity to continue to grow professionally.

But the most enjoyable part of her job, she adds, is building relationships with colleagues and customers to make a project that is having a real impact on the ground.

“One of my favorite quotes is from a senior superintendent who had been working in the field for 30 years. Out of nowhere, he sent us a note that said, ‘I never graduated from high school. I worked through the trade as a carpenter to a superintendent today. I have to say, after 28-plus years, PlanGrid is the best tool that has ever been given to me,’” Young says. “Being able to influence and help someone who deserves great software is definitely rewarding.”

This story was updated in November 2018 to include information about Autodesk’s acquisition of PlanGrid.